What’s inside the Samsung Galaxy S 4?

The Samsung Galaxy S 4 might not have reached store shelves everywhere but that hasn’t stopped the guys iFixit from tearing one apart anyway. They got hold of a US variant of the Galaxy S 4, which as expected was dominated by silicon from Qualcomm. The Indian version, however, runs on Samsung’s own Exynos 5 Octa chipset, though it would still have components from Qualcomm.

The teardown reveals that the Galaxy S 4 is a relatively easy smartphone to repair, unlike the HTC One, which turned out to be supremely difficult owing to its unibody design. Rating the Galaxy S 4 an 8 out of 10 in repairability, iFixit reckons that the use of standard Philips screws to bolt the entire phone together makes it easy to open and repair.

One of the crucial learnings from the teardown is that we finally know how the Galaxy S 4′s Air View and Air Gesture features work. Samsung has incorporated two IR sensors on either side of the earpiece on the top front part of the phone. These sensors detect when the user’s hand moves from one side to another and identify the corresponding gesture.